page_title: Island of Stroma
section_title: Island of ruins
hierarchical_section_title: Island of Stroma / History / Island of ruins
caption_attribution_description: Interior of an abandoned house on Stroma
context_page_description: The Island of Stroma or Stroma, is an island off the northern coast of the mainland of Scotland. It is the most southerly of the islands in the Pentland Firth between the Orkney islands and the traditional county of Caithness and therein the civil parish of Canisbay, the northeasternmost part of the mainland. Stroma is part of the county of Caithness. The name is from the Old Norse Straumr-øy meaning "island in the [tidal] stream".
  Ancient stone structures testify to the presence of Stroma's earliest residents, while a Norse presence around 900–1,000 years ago is recorded in the Orkneyinga Saga. It has been politically united with Caithness since at least the 15th century. Although Stroma lies only a few miles off the Scottish coast, the savage weather and ferociously strong tides of the Pentland Firth meant that the island's inhabitants were very isolated, causing them to be largely self-sufficient, trading agricultural produce and fish with the mainlanders.
  Most of the islanders were fishermen and crofters; some also worked as maritime pilots to guide vessels through the treacherous waters of the Pentland Firth.
context_section_description: Stroma is now entirely deserted by humans; its only permanent inhabitants are the seals, birds and sheep that live on the island. The church, school and old croft houses stand derelict, with many having fallen into ruin. The writer Bella Bathurst, visiting the island in the early 2010s, described the scene:
  The houses along the main road down the spine of the island seem to have rotted at different rates. Those crofts, which have somehow managed to keep their glazing and their roof-slates, are in much better condition than the others. In some, the furniture is still laid out as if only recently abandoned: iron bedsteads with mattresses, tables, armchairs, cupboards full of boots and bottles, everything arranged with the same care and compaction as it would be on a boat. But most crofts have already lost the war with the weather. As soon as the tiles go, the damp begins to sidle into the mortaring; within a couple of years all that is left are a few bony ribs and the stark gable ends.
  Inside some of the houses, Bathurst writes, everyday objects still remain where they were left decades ago; "the bed and the limed matchboard ceiling are intact, untouched even by the damp. The kitchen table still stands in the parlour and a framed and fading photograph gazes out from the top of the mantelpiece." In another house seen 20 years earlier by Leslie Thomas, "was a rank of family photographs, shades in Victorian dress staring out forever into a room now desolate and holed, but which had once held the life of a warm family."
  Elsewhere, the books remain "dusty but tidy" in the abandoned school, and the church still contains its pulpit, "dumb and hung with ragged red tassles" with prayer books "left to be trampled upon by heathen sheep and nibbled by rabbits and rats." In the former post office, forms and licence applications and a bottle of dried ink still stand on the counter, while in a back room stands "a nice dresser, upon which [stands] a teapot and a jug and some sheet music: 'Red Sails in the Sunset', 'The General's Fast Asleep' and 'You Can't Do That There 'Ere.' Nobody on Stroma will ever sing those songs now."
  Bathurst and Thomas express contrasting views on the significance of Stroma's abandonment. Thomas regards it as a tragedy: "Of all the out-of-the-way places I have known, this was the saddest. It seemed as though its life had been ended in a fit of pique." To Bathurst, however, "it is tempting to see Stroma's abandonment as the result of some appalling trauma. Abandonment is always taken as a sign of failure, a collective death ... But Stroma does not feel sad. True, there is sorrow in seeing the once meticulous vegetable patches turned over to weeds, or wondering how many more winters the box beds will stand before they start to rot. But that isn't the whole story. What is interesting about Stroma is not the fact of its abandonment, but the tale of its past."
  MeyGen Ltd installed four giant tidal turbines on the ocean floor near the island of Stroma, and produced 25 GWh of electrical energy in 2019, enough to supply the electric needs of 4,000 homes.
caption: Interior of an abandoned house on Stroma
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